Concept

Divine Conservationism

Intro

Divine conservationism, also called mere conservationism to distinguish it from broader uses of the word, is the position that God conserves creatures in existence at every moment, but creatures have their own genuine causal powers and act on their own.

On this view, when fire burns cotton, the fire really causes the burning, not God. God's role is to keep both the fire and the cotton in existence; once they exist, the fire's natural power does the burning. When you decide to raise your arm, you really cause the arm-raising; God's role is to sustain you (and your arm) in existence so that you can be the cause of the action.

The name "conservation" refers to God's conservatio, His ongoing preservation of creatures in being. The position is sometimes called mere conservationism because it is the weakest of the three classical positions on God-creature causal cooperation: God's role is only conservation, not also concurrence with each causal act.

The position is associated historically with Durandus of Saint-Pourçain (c. 1275-1334), a 14th-century Dominican who departed from his order's Thomist mainstream. In contemporary philosophy of religion, Alfred Freddoso of Notre Dame has been the major rehabilitator, though Freddoso himself is a concurrentist and treats conservationism as a coherent but inferior position.

Conservationism is one of three classical positions on God's relationship to created causation. The other two are Occasionalism (God is the only true cause; creatures are just occasions) and Concurrentism (God both sustains creatures and directly cooperates with every causal act). Conservationism is the weakest position on divine involvement in causation and the strongest on creaturely independence; occasionalism is its opposite; concurrentism is the mainstream middle position.

In full

Divine conservationism (or mere conservationism) is the metaphysical-theological position that God's only ongoing causal role in the created order is to conserve creatures in existence; creatures themselves are the efficient causes of their own actions and of each other's effects. The position is to be carefully distinguished from broader senses of "conservation" used by all three classical positions: occasionalists, concurrentists, and conservationists all agree that God conserves creatures in existence; they differ on whether God's involvement extends beyond conservation to direct or concurrent involvement in each causal act. Mere conservationism is the position that conservation is the whole story of God's role in creature-to-creature causation.

The position has a clear motivation: it preserves the intuitive integrity of secondary causation. Natural causes really cause; human wills really will; the sciences really investigate real causal powers; moral agents really act. God's role is upstream (sustaining the existence of the agents and patients) rather than ongoing-and-direct in each act. The position fits comfortably with Genesis 1:11 ("let the earth put forth grass", with the earth doing the putting-forth) and similar texts where God grants creatures their own productive powers and lets them operate.

The position's distinctness from concurrentism turns on a subtle metaphysical question: when a creature acts, does God do anything other than sustain the creature in being? Conservationists say no, the creature's own power does the rest. Concurrentists say yes, God's concursus cooperates with the creature's act, such that without God's concurrent action no creature could in fact act. Conservationists view this concurrent action as either explanatorily empty (sustaining-in-being suffices) or as collapsing toward occasionalism (if God's concursus is what does the causing, the creature is not really the cause).

The position is the minority view across Christian theology. Most Catholic philosophy (Aquinas and the Thomist mainstream), most Reformed theology, and most Eastern Orthodox theology endorse concurrentism. Conservationism survives as a serious philosophical option (Freddoso's work has reopened the discussion) and as a position several early-modern thinkers held more or less explicitly.

Historical development

• Durandus of Saint-Pourçain (c. 1275-1334) is the canonical medieval conservationist. A Dominican who broke with his order's Thomism on multiple points, Durandus held that God's conservation of creatures in being is sufficient for their action; no further concursus generalis is required. The position was condemned by the Thomist mainstream and Durandus himself qualified some of his views, but the conservationist position is named for him in much modern literature.
• Pierre d'Ailly (1351-1420) and some other late-medieval nominalists held related positions, though the relationship between nominalism and conservationism is complex.
• Some early-modern thinkers (often without using the technical scholastic vocabulary) effectively held conservationist positions: many of the early-modern cogitatio Dei discussions assume creatures act on their own once sustained.
• Modern revival: Alfred Freddoso (Notre Dame) is the major contemporary engagement. His articles "God's General Concurrence with Secondary Causes: Why Conservationism Is Not Enough" (Philosophical Perspectives, 1991) and "God's General Concurrence with Secondary Causes: Pitfalls and Prospects" (American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 1994) are the canonical contemporary treatments. Freddoso is himself a concurrentist; the articles defend concurrentism by carefully distinguishing it from both occasionalism and conservationism and arguing against the latter. The discussion has reawakened interest in conservationism as a coherent option even where it remains a minority position.
• Hugh McCann (Texas A&M) and William Hasker (Huntington) have engaged related questions in contemporary philosophy of religion.

Biblical and theological grounding

The texts most often invoked in conservationism's favor:

• Genesis 1:11, "Let the earth put forth grass, herbs yielding seed, and fruit-trees bearing fruit after their kind", with the earth doing the putting-forth. The grammatical structure of the creation account repeatedly grants creatures their own productive powers.
• Genesis 1:24, "Let the earth bring forth living creatures after their kind, cattle, and creeping things, and beasts of the earth", again with the earth as the productive agent.
• Genesis 8:22, "While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest... shall not cease", the regular cycles of nature treated as ongoing patterns rather than direct moment-to-moment divine action.
• Matthew 13:31-32, the mustard-seed parable, the seed grows; the growing is the creature's, not directly God's.
• Mark 4:26-29, "the earth beareth fruit of herself; first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear", particularly striking, the earth bears fruit of itself (Greek automatē).
• 1 Corinthians 3:6-7, "I planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase", the role of creatures (Paul, Apollos) is real causal work; God's role is the increase, sometimes read as the conservationist's pattern of upstream divine action.

Concurrentists read the same texts as compatible with concurrent divine action (creatures really act with God's cooperation, which preserves both the texts' grant of creaturely powers and the broader pattern of divine involvement). Occasionalists read the same texts as concessive language about occasions on which God acts. The dispute is whether texts granting creatures productive powers entail that God does nothing beyond conservation when those powers are exercised.

Strengths

1. Maximally preserves the integrity of secondary causation. Natural causes really cause, human wills really act, the sciences investigate real causal regularities. The intuitive picture is fully vindicated.
2. Clean account of natural science. Scientific investigation finds real causal powers, not just patterns of God's regular willing. The natural sciences are tracking the actual causal structure of the created order.
3. Clean account of human freedom and moral responsibility. Human wills really cause human actions; moral responsibility falls cleanly on the human agent without complex disputes about divine concurrence.
4. Tracks biblical creature-causation language. Texts like Gen 1:11, Mark 4:26-29, 1 Cor 3:6-7 grant creatures real productive powers; conservationism takes this granting at face value.
5. Parsimonious. If sustaining creatures in existence is sufficient for creature-to-creature causation, no further concurrent divine action needs to be posited. The position avoids the metaphysical complexity of working out exactly what concursus generalis is and how it cooperates with creaturely acts.

Problems and standard objections

1. The standard Thomist objection: it gives God too small a role. If God's only ongoing role is conservation, His involvement in the world is reduced to upstream sustaining; the immanent divine activity in each created event affirmed by classical theism (esp. in the Latin tradition's Deus operatur in omni operante) is lost. Aquinas argued that God's general concurrence is required by His role as first cause; without it, the first cause is too distant from secondary effects.
2. Tendency toward deism. Without continuing concurrent involvement, the conservationist's God risks looking like a watchmaker who wound up the universe and now merely sustains it without participating in its ongoing operations. Conservationists deny the slide and emphasize that conservation is a continuous ongoing activity, but the worry recurs.
3. Threatens the doctrine of providence in detailed form. If God's role is only conservation, His detailed providential ordering of every event becomes harder to ground. Biblical providence-language (a sparrow falling, Matthew 10:29; a lot cast in the lap, Proverbs 16:33; the king's heart in God's hand, Proverbs 21:1) seems to require more than upstream sustaining.
4. Has trouble with petitionary prayer. If creatures act on their own once sustained, God's response to a specific prayer requires intervening in the natural causal order in a way that breaks the conservationist's parsimony. Concurrentism accommodates particular providence more naturally.
5. Has trouble with the grace-and-free-will dispute. The Thomist account of grace as cooperating with the will via concursus is unavailable to the conservationist; the conservationist must offer a different account of how grace operates in conversion and sanctification, and the resources are limited.
6. Distinct from but uncomfortably close to deism in popular perception. Many critics conflate conservationism with deism; the conservationist must constantly clarify that conservation is genuinely continuous sustaining and not just initial-and-then-absent agency.

Position in the spread

Divine conservationism is one of three classical positions on God's relationship to created causation. The full spread:

All three positions agree that God sustains creatures in existence at every moment. They differ on whether creatures have their own causal powers and whether God's involvement in each causal act is direct (occasionalism), concurrent (concurrentism), or absent (conservationism).

Position versus deism

Divine conservationism is not deism, despite surface resemblance. The crucial distinction:

Deism treats God as starting the universe and then withdrawing; conservationism treats God as sustaining the universe in being at every moment, without which it would immediately cease to exist. Conservationism is theistically much closer to concurrentism than to deism; the divergence from concurrentism is over whether God does more than sustain (concurrent involvement in each causal act) or only sustain (conservationism's restrained view).

The two are sometimes conflated in popular treatments because the conservationist's denial of concurrent divine action in each event can sound deistic to ears trained in Thomist categories. The technical philosophical literature carefully distinguishes them.

See also

• Occasionalism, the opposite extreme; God is the only cause and creatures have no causal power
• Concurrentism, the Thomist mainstream middle position; God sustains creatures and cooperates with each act
• Foreknowledge vs Causation, related metaphysical distinction
• Per Se vs Per Accidens Causation, scholastic causal distinction that the conservationist can preserve cleanly
• Free Will and Determinism, the broader free-will / determinism master hub
• Calvinism vs Arminianism vs Molinism vs Open Theism, the soteriological spread; conservationism's account of grace is the most challenging within Reformed theology
• Causal Principle (Everything That Begins to Exist Has a Cause), the apologetic-cosmological causal principle (conservationism is consistent with it, with both God and creatures being legitimate causes)
• Major figures: Durandus of Saint-Pourçain (c. 1275-1334), Pierre d'Ailly (1351-1420), Alfred Freddoso (b. 1947, modern engagement), Hugh McCann, William Hasker
• Passages frequently invoked: Gen 1:11, Gen 1:24, Gen 8:22, Matthew 13:31-32, Mark 4:26-29, 1 Cor 3:6-7